[At right - Made me laugh. It cracks me up when women worry about getting "bulky" from lifting weights. It's something you read online all the time. You have any idea of the number of guys who would kill if they could get "bulky" that easy? It takes a ridiculous amount of heavy, strenuous, back breaking work to bulk up and gain muscle weight. Not to mention very strict and serious dietary, supplemental and, in some cases, pharmaceutical aid.]

Sunday, October 23, 2011

The concept of a regimented eating plan didn't hold up nearly as well this past week as training did. A mid-week dinner with friends with excellent food and wine, another dinner out w/my lovely wife, a Sunday brunch - complete with Bloody Marys and chocolate beer... and, well, there wasn't a great deal of distinction between time on-point and off. So one pic of food this week...

Additionally, as the Mrs joined me on all of the above occasions, plus she had dinner meetings and business related luncheons throughout the week, no "cooked for the wife" pic, as the only thing I did was heat up some leftovers early in the week.

The advice was horrifyingly simple: When you find yourself pausing in between normal projects and work tasks for anything more than, say, 30 seconds, why not take those tiny moments and, well, do more things? ...what else are you gonna do, breathe? Feel? Merely... exist? What are you, a hippie?
...Do not misunderstand. I'm all for a nice bit of work efficiency, for avoiding procrastination and getting down to the business of cranking out your own brand of special juicy goodness; I'm all for feeling a fine and gratifying sense of accomplishment at the end of it all, even though it's fleeting and transitory and the very next morning, hey look, a nice new pile of stuff waiting for you...How easily we forget. Time expands, time contracts. Work will swell or diminish to fill a given space. You can do 10 things in an hour or one thing in 10...
Have you forgotten that we invented time? That clocks did not exist in any real way until the 14th century? That hours and minutes and seconds, to the ancients, were measured in breaths and blinks, sunlight and moonlight, soil fecundity and menstrual cycles, the howls of the coyotes and the migrations of the birds? Of course you have. This is the magic of time. It swallows collective memory..."

'This man' is Grant Morrison. And he is awesome. Much more at the link. Well worth clicking over and reading in full.

Grant Morrison at the Edinburgh Book Festival - Full and Uncut | comicbookGRRRL: "...So it seemed that, to write that story was to say what the power of comics actually was, it was the Shazam, if you take this stuff so seriously that you end up doing it as a job, that you allow it to seep into your life, and you allow yourself to become semi-fictional in order to write fiction, then you find yourself in some very interesting territory...So I thought the book really needed that element of personal experience and I figured that since I'm someone who still works in the business at a fairly high level that it was almost justified to include the level of autobiography that I did. A lot of reviewers were so freaked out, you know they got to... they say "I loved this book until I get to page 224 and this guy's in a dress summoning Voodoo gods! Who is this man? How dare he enter my history of superheroes!"But I kind of thought that a lot of the audience who weren't into the history of superheroes might be able to find something in a human life and how a human life can be bent and twisted and honestly, ennobled as far as I'm concerned, and made more magical by actually adhering to some of the principals in these comic books....what we were seeing here is some kind of return of the best unconscious response to the fact that we've been sold a narrative of absolute destruction and extinction. You know in the West, and today even in the West when people are better off and healthier and safer than they've been at any time in the past, we're still telling ourselves the story that the environment is doomed and we can't fix it, we're telling ourselves the story that our children are insane and cannot be fixed and cannot be redeemed. There is no hope, our politicians are idiots, our comedians are depressive, they're suicidal, our models are bulimics. Everything has got this dark side...I picked up New Scientist in February and there was an article in there talking about how the US military were now developing what they call counter-narrative strategies. And it's basically the weaponisation of stories. Right? And I thought, this is really fascinating, because basically what they've admitted is that stories have an effect. You know, I mean this is no surprise to anyone who's thought about this for five minutes but they've kinda admitted that yes, stories have an effect. Self hypnosis works, placebos work, nocebos work, if an authority figure tells you they're giving you a pill to make you feel better, the chances are you'll feel better. If the same authority figure tells you the world is doomed, the chances are you will begin to believe that. Your children will start to act as if the world is doomed, so they'll cut themselves, they'll dress in black, they'll throw bins through windows and steal stuff. Because there's no future, you've given them nothing to believe in. I honestly think this is self hypnosis right now, and our culture could do a lot more. We could be building starships, we could do a lot more than we're actually doing, and we're fucking around.And it seemed very strange that we're telling this very dark story, and I thought the idea of the superhero has arisen as a response to that. Whether it's an unconscious response, whether there were some people deliberately saying well this is all we've got, we don't have Star Trek any more, we don't have a space programme, there is no image of the future that is not dystopian, except for the idea of the superhero. The notion that maybe one day we can pull off these shirts and reveal some kind of inner self that's our highest, our best, our kindest, our toughest, our wisest, our smartest, and actually use that to get out of our problems. Because we created these ideas to solve problems. There is no enemy that Superman can't defeat, there is no enemy Batman can't defeat, these are ideas that cannot be destroyed...So I thought there's something in that idea that maybe we should be latching on to, maybe we should be using this as a counter-narrative strategy, against the one that we're selling people right now, and there's something in this. You know, I think there's a power in it, however crude and however small and... what would you call it... culturally unacceptable an area that it comes from, it's actually, those are the places we sometimes find the real truths. Where people have been allowed to say things that the rest of the culture isn't allowing us to say, which is maybe that maybe we're okay. You know, the scariest thing you can say to anyone, and try it tomorrow with all your friends, is to say maybe the world isn't going to end! Maybe it's all meant to be like this, and it's all working out just fine! And all those riots and everything, that's just part of the process, that's just something heating up and moving and changing, and that's just how it looks to us, because we're so small and so short-lived that we don't see the longer processes that are involved.If you say that to anyone they'll go "No! No, no, we're all doomed! Don't you get it? We are doomed!" [laughs]. So I kind of, I wanted to bring that out and to use, yeah there's a manifesto in it to the sense that we have ideas here that were created to solve any problem – let's set them loose on our problems..."